Clearing the smoke in chronic liver diseases

In the 1930s, serious concerns about the health risks of cigarette smoking (CS) began to surface. During subsequent decades, scientific reports linking CS and specific ailments rapidly accumulated [1,2], but it was not until 1964 that the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health finally acknowledged that CS was linked to specific diseases and to increased mortality. Today, the evidence is robust: The adverse effects of CS on several cancer outcomes as well as on cardiovascular and respiratory disease are established [3, 4]. Although in the US the prevalence of CS has been decreasing [5], the overall worldwide prevalence is steadily rising. Independent of prevalence rates, the absolute number of smokers everywhere keeps increasing due to population growth.